I'm running Debian Lenny on two different machines with Gnome desktop and VMware server 2.Both are having the same issue.
My /var/log/vmware/hostd.log has
2009-12-13 18:49:40.834 'Proxysvc Req00006' 3062860688 warning Connection to server localhost:8308 failed with error Could not find host address for localhost: Unknown host. Retrying...
2009-12-13 18:49:40.835 'Proxysvc Req00006' 3062860688 warning Connection to server localhost:8308 failed with error Could not find host address for localhost: Unknown host. Retrying...
2009-12-13 18:49:40.836 'Proxysvc Req00006' 3062860688 warning Connection to server localhost:8308 failed with error Could not find host address for localhost: Unknown host. Retrying...
2009-12-13 18:49:40.836 'Proxysvc Req00006' 3062860688 warning Connection to server localhost:8308 failed with error Could not find host address for localhost: Unknown host. Retrying...
2009-12-13 18:49:40.837 'Proxysvc Req00006' 3062860688 warning Connection to server localhost:8308 failed with error Could not find host address for localhost: Unknown host. Retrying...
2009-12-13 18:49:40.837 'Proxysvc Req00006' 3062860688 warning Connection to server localhost:8308 failed with error Could not find host address for localhost: Unknown host. Retrying...
2009-12-13 18:49:40.838 'Proxysvc Req00006' 3062860688 warning Connection to server localhost:8308 failed with error Could not find host address for localhost: Unknown host. Retrying...
2009-12-13 18:49:40.838 'Proxysvc Req00006' 3062860688 warning Connection to server localhost:8308 failed with error Could not find host address for localhost: Unknown host. Retrying...
2009-12-13 18:49:40.839 'Proxysvc Req00006' 3062860688 warning Connection to server localhost:8308 failed with error Could not find host address for localhost: Unknown host. Retrying...
2009-12-13 18:49:40.841 'Proxysvc Req00006' 3062860688 warning Connection to server localhost:8308 failed with error Could not find host address for localhost: Unknown host. Retrying...
2009-12-13 18:49:40.842 'Proxysvc Req00006' 3062860688 warning Exception while processing request: Could not find host address for localhost: Unknown host
which looks a lot like stuff I've seen elsewhere in the forum.
The recommended fix was to make sure my /etc/hosts file had a line pointing to localhost
But here are the first couple of lines of my /etc/hosts file.
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost escher.turriehome.com
192.168.1.9 escher.turriehome.com escher
I've modified the first line of the file to add the localhost.localdomain entry. It didn't help, Stopping my firewall didn't help either.
As additional data I tried nslookup localhost and got:
bruce@escher:~$ nslookup localhost
Server: 192.168.1.9
Address: 192.168.1.9#53
Name: localhost
Address: 127.0.0.1
which looks okay too.
One note: I added resolvconf and avahi-dnsconfd programs to both systems today which may have changed or hosed things. Anyway for now vmware is dead in the water.